Sunday, October 28, 2018
Saturday, October 27, 2018
At The Crossroads
The other day Paul Krugman noted that we are really not prepared for the onslaught that will come from Trump after the midterms, no matter whether the Democrats win at least one house of Congress or not. If the Democrats don't win at least the House, Trump will interpret the result as a green light for all of his worst instincts. And even if Democrats do win the House, Trump will claim their victory is illegitimate and treat them accordingly.
Even with Democratic oversight power finally backed up by the power to subpoena, the Trump administration will engage in unprecedented obstruction. As Krugman says, "Republicans will claim that the election was stolen, and deny the majority's legitimacy...Democrats will gain subpoena power -- but expect the Trump administration to simply defy requests for information...And they'll use claims of voter fraud to justify their disregard of the law and Constitution." And it's not like the Trump administration has not already used unprecedented tactics to block Congressional oversight. Krugman mentions the refusal of the Veterans Administration (VA) to turn over documents relating to the reports that three private citizens, members of Mar-a-Lago, have been directing VA policy.
And it's not like Trump administration officials have been wary about lying to Congress even when they do testify under oath. At least five of Trump's original cabinet members lied under oath. It is clear that Don Jr., Erik Prince, Brett Kavanaugh, Emily Murphy, Kirstjen Nielsen, and others too numerous to mention have all been caught lying to Congress. Some, like Wilbur Ross, have lied multiple times about multiple subjects. There is no reason for that stop simply because the Democrats control the committees in the House.
Trump has every incentive to block any attempts for Democratic oversight and turn them into to life-and-death partisan battles. He will rail against the illegitimacy of the Democrats and claim he is the victim of a vicious partisan attack that is an attempt to overthrow his own legitimate election. And he will now have the Supreme Court to back him up in this constitutional struggles. Sarah Kendzior has stated that "autocrats will rewrite the law itself so that they will no longer be breaking it". The Roberts Court stands ready to do just that for this president,
The Court is already flexing its ultra-conservative muscle in remarkable ways. The Court recently spared Wilbur Ross from being deposed about his lie to Congress about the origins of the idea to add the citizenship question to the census. More disturbing, however, was Gorsuch's dissent on the decision which basically stated that there was no legal basis for questioning the decision of the Commerce Department to add the question and that the case brought against Ross and the Department should be dismissed. Gorsuch's dissent seemingly claims that the executive branch can execute any policy it wants without necessarily following the proper administrative and bureaucratic channels. And now Gorsuch's dissent has helped prompt the DOJ to ask for a delay in the citizenship trial so that they can make another filing with SCOTUS to have the case thrown out. Of course, a long enough delay will make it impossible to stop the question from being added. All of this does not bode well for the effectiveness of Democratic oversight.
In addition, Justice Roberts just intervened in a highly unusual way in order to temporarily halt a landmark environmental case brought by young plaintiffs ranging in age from 11 to 22. The case has been controversial from the start because of its massive discovery process and the possibility that it usurps the power of Congress and the executive. But, so far, courts have allowed the case to proceed and it was scheduled to finally go to trial on October 29th. The federal government was currently challenging that decision to go forward to the Court of Appeals until Roberts stepped in.
As one law professor noted, "It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for the Supreme Court to enjoin a trial when the Court of Appeals is still considering the case. Ordinarily they’ll wait for the lower court to rule". Not anymore. With the Court now firmly in partisan conservative control, the Justice Department is more and more frequently bypassing lower courts and taking their case to the comfortable venue of the Supreme Court. It's nice to be able to venue-shop at the nation's highest court.
Control of the Court will become important as the results of the midterm elections are contested by one or both parties, which may require legal adjudication, as will those in control of the electoral processes in the various states where these close and contested elections occur. And it is certain that Trump and the GOP will contest or challenge the results if the Democrats win the House.
Similarly, the Court will become important when the President defies subpoenas from the Democratic House or Robert Mueller. As Newt Gingrich said in response to a question about what would happen if the Democrats subpoenaed Trump's tax records, "Then they’ll [the Democrats will] be trapped into appealing to the Supreme Court, and we’ll see whether or not the Kavanaugh fight was worth it".
I have already written about the coming evisceration of DOJ independence after the midterms. "Trump and the GOP have already been emboldened by the previous capitulation of the DOJ to their political demands". After the success of the Kavanaugh confirmation, "Trump will only test the boundaries further. It is already in the cards that Jeff Sessions will be gone after the midterms and the Mueller investigation will be vastly constricted or killed entirely at the same time. With Kavanaugh's views on the 'unitary executive' being similar those espoused by Dershowitz and the Federalist Society crowd, Trump can pardon everyone of his cronies that Mueller has already indicted and convicted. And then he can begin the investigation of both Democratic and democratic opponents, including a purge in the DOJ/FBI itself, under the guise that China is attacking our elections by targeting Trump voters with its retaliatory tariffs". Alan Dershowitz clearly states that the President has the authority "to tell the Justice Department who to investigate, who to prosecute, and who not to investigate, and who not to prosecute" and you can be sure the President will use and abuse that power. It's not like he hasn't already tried this already and has, in fact, had limited success. The DOJ, for example, re-opened the investigation into Hillary's emails.
Earlier this week, Trump ordered the military to be deployed to our southern border under the pretext of protecting the country from the arrival what he falsely calls a "caravan" filled with MS-13 and terrorists. This collection of refugees is still over 1,000 miles away from the US border and won't arrive at our border for another few weeks, if at all. When this idea was floated earlier this spring, one border patrol official described it as a having "no benefit" and a "colossal waste of resources". But Trump is now successfully using the military for purely political and propaganda purposes. In addition, at the urging of John Bolton, there is a proposal floating around to simply seal off the southern border. There has been very little pushback on this deployment, mostly because of bigger issues the country is confronting, but, having gotten away with this now, you can be sure that Trump will escalate his use of the military for political purposes in the future. At present, the military deployment will merely support regular Border Patrol in a non-enforcement role. But remember, as far as the Border Patrol is concerned, the actual border extends 100 miles into the US from any existing border line, meaning that at least theoretically, the US military could be conducting operations well inside the US.
Early this month, I wrote that "It seems probable that we will see what is essentially government-sponsored violence, mainly driven by Trump's divisive and destructive rhetoric" in the post-election period. I did not expect that this would happen before the election or that the entire Democratic and opposition leadership against Trump would be targeted for assassination. But it has happened and Trump's response has been essentially to green-light further attacks from his partisan supporters. And Trump's attacks and provocations against his opponents will not only continue but escalate in the post-election period. The 2020 election begins the moment the midterms end and continually fueling the anger in his base is the only path Trump has to victory in 2020.
Sarah Kendzior has described our current situation as being at the crossroads of a failing democracy and a budding autocracy. Obviously, the upcoming elections will be almost determinative of the direction the country chooses. But simply winning the House and, most optimistically, the Senate as well, and obtaining the oversight power necessary to at least put some kind of check on Trump, will only be the opening battle in the struggle to save our democracy. The constitutional crisis that has been on a slow burn for the last two years will finally come to a boil after the midterms as Trump rejects the legitimacy of any Democratic power or any real restraint on his own.
Republicans have played the long game for decades. Because that party is less ideologically diverse, that has been far easier for them than for Democrats. But Democrats must adopt that long game strategy to combat Trump and the emergence of the radical, violent right. It will not take one or two elections to revive our democracy, with all the structural changes that will be required. It will take a concerted, perhaps decades-long, effort to recreate the foundations for the ideals that the founders had for this country two and a half centuries ago.
Even with Democratic oversight power finally backed up by the power to subpoena, the Trump administration will engage in unprecedented obstruction. As Krugman says, "Republicans will claim that the election was stolen, and deny the majority's legitimacy...Democrats will gain subpoena power -- but expect the Trump administration to simply defy requests for information...And they'll use claims of voter fraud to justify their disregard of the law and Constitution." And it's not like the Trump administration has not already used unprecedented tactics to block Congressional oversight. Krugman mentions the refusal of the Veterans Administration (VA) to turn over documents relating to the reports that three private citizens, members of Mar-a-Lago, have been directing VA policy.
And it's not like Trump administration officials have been wary about lying to Congress even when they do testify under oath. At least five of Trump's original cabinet members lied under oath. It is clear that Don Jr., Erik Prince, Brett Kavanaugh, Emily Murphy, Kirstjen Nielsen, and others too numerous to mention have all been caught lying to Congress. Some, like Wilbur Ross, have lied multiple times about multiple subjects. There is no reason for that stop simply because the Democrats control the committees in the House.
Trump has every incentive to block any attempts for Democratic oversight and turn them into to life-and-death partisan battles. He will rail against the illegitimacy of the Democrats and claim he is the victim of a vicious partisan attack that is an attempt to overthrow his own legitimate election. And he will now have the Supreme Court to back him up in this constitutional struggles. Sarah Kendzior has stated that "autocrats will rewrite the law itself so that they will no longer be breaking it". The Roberts Court stands ready to do just that for this president,
The Court is already flexing its ultra-conservative muscle in remarkable ways. The Court recently spared Wilbur Ross from being deposed about his lie to Congress about the origins of the idea to add the citizenship question to the census. More disturbing, however, was Gorsuch's dissent on the decision which basically stated that there was no legal basis for questioning the decision of the Commerce Department to add the question and that the case brought against Ross and the Department should be dismissed. Gorsuch's dissent seemingly claims that the executive branch can execute any policy it wants without necessarily following the proper administrative and bureaucratic channels. And now Gorsuch's dissent has helped prompt the DOJ to ask for a delay in the citizenship trial so that they can make another filing with SCOTUS to have the case thrown out. Of course, a long enough delay will make it impossible to stop the question from being added. All of this does not bode well for the effectiveness of Democratic oversight.
In addition, Justice Roberts just intervened in a highly unusual way in order to temporarily halt a landmark environmental case brought by young plaintiffs ranging in age from 11 to 22. The case has been controversial from the start because of its massive discovery process and the possibility that it usurps the power of Congress and the executive. But, so far, courts have allowed the case to proceed and it was scheduled to finally go to trial on October 29th. The federal government was currently challenging that decision to go forward to the Court of Appeals until Roberts stepped in.
As one law professor noted, "It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for the Supreme Court to enjoin a trial when the Court of Appeals is still considering the case. Ordinarily they’ll wait for the lower court to rule". Not anymore. With the Court now firmly in partisan conservative control, the Justice Department is more and more frequently bypassing lower courts and taking their case to the comfortable venue of the Supreme Court. It's nice to be able to venue-shop at the nation's highest court.
Control of the Court will become important as the results of the midterm elections are contested by one or both parties, which may require legal adjudication, as will those in control of the electoral processes in the various states where these close and contested elections occur. And it is certain that Trump and the GOP will contest or challenge the results if the Democrats win the House.
Similarly, the Court will become important when the President defies subpoenas from the Democratic House or Robert Mueller. As Newt Gingrich said in response to a question about what would happen if the Democrats subpoenaed Trump's tax records, "Then they’ll [the Democrats will] be trapped into appealing to the Supreme Court, and we’ll see whether or not the Kavanaugh fight was worth it".
I have already written about the coming evisceration of DOJ independence after the midterms. "Trump and the GOP have already been emboldened by the previous capitulation of the DOJ to their political demands". After the success of the Kavanaugh confirmation, "Trump will only test the boundaries further. It is already in the cards that Jeff Sessions will be gone after the midterms and the Mueller investigation will be vastly constricted or killed entirely at the same time. With Kavanaugh's views on the 'unitary executive' being similar those espoused by Dershowitz and the Federalist Society crowd, Trump can pardon everyone of his cronies that Mueller has already indicted and convicted. And then he can begin the investigation of both Democratic and democratic opponents, including a purge in the DOJ/FBI itself, under the guise that China is attacking our elections by targeting Trump voters with its retaliatory tariffs". Alan Dershowitz clearly states that the President has the authority "to tell the Justice Department who to investigate, who to prosecute, and who not to investigate, and who not to prosecute" and you can be sure the President will use and abuse that power. It's not like he hasn't already tried this already and has, in fact, had limited success. The DOJ, for example, re-opened the investigation into Hillary's emails.
Earlier this week, Trump ordered the military to be deployed to our southern border under the pretext of protecting the country from the arrival what he falsely calls a "caravan" filled with MS-13 and terrorists. This collection of refugees is still over 1,000 miles away from the US border and won't arrive at our border for another few weeks, if at all. When this idea was floated earlier this spring, one border patrol official described it as a having "no benefit" and a "colossal waste of resources". But Trump is now successfully using the military for purely political and propaganda purposes. In addition, at the urging of John Bolton, there is a proposal floating around to simply seal off the southern border. There has been very little pushback on this deployment, mostly because of bigger issues the country is confronting, but, having gotten away with this now, you can be sure that Trump will escalate his use of the military for political purposes in the future. At present, the military deployment will merely support regular Border Patrol in a non-enforcement role. But remember, as far as the Border Patrol is concerned, the actual border extends 100 miles into the US from any existing border line, meaning that at least theoretically, the US military could be conducting operations well inside the US.
Early this month, I wrote that "It seems probable that we will see what is essentially government-sponsored violence, mainly driven by Trump's divisive and destructive rhetoric" in the post-election period. I did not expect that this would happen before the election or that the entire Democratic and opposition leadership against Trump would be targeted for assassination. But it has happened and Trump's response has been essentially to green-light further attacks from his partisan supporters. And Trump's attacks and provocations against his opponents will not only continue but escalate in the post-election period. The 2020 election begins the moment the midterms end and continually fueling the anger in his base is the only path Trump has to victory in 2020.
Sarah Kendzior has described our current situation as being at the crossroads of a failing democracy and a budding autocracy. Obviously, the upcoming elections will be almost determinative of the direction the country chooses. But simply winning the House and, most optimistically, the Senate as well, and obtaining the oversight power necessary to at least put some kind of check on Trump, will only be the opening battle in the struggle to save our democracy. The constitutional crisis that has been on a slow burn for the last two years will finally come to a boil after the midterms as Trump rejects the legitimacy of any Democratic power or any real restraint on his own.
Republicans have played the long game for decades. Because that party is less ideologically diverse, that has been far easier for them than for Democrats. But Democrats must adopt that long game strategy to combat Trump and the emergence of the radical, violent right. It will not take one or two elections to revive our democracy, with all the structural changes that will be required. It will take a concerted, perhaps decades-long, effort to recreate the foundations for the ideals that the founders had for this country two and a half centuries ago.
Friday, October 26, 2018
Yes, More Action From Game 2 Of The World Series
Game 3 will begin shortly, so here are the lost shots from the Red Sox 4-2 win in game 2:
MVP Mookie Betts takes a lead off third as Alexander delivers.
Turner being thrown out at first, again.
Nearly some confusion among the Sox on a short fly to left.
Bellinger with some great center field defense.
More Action from Game 2 Of World Series
A beautiful, but chilly, night for a ballgame at Fenway.
Ryu delivers with a runner on first.
Machado hustling to score on Puig's single.
Price looking to get out of jam with Taylor on third and Puig on first.
Thursday, October 25, 2018
World Series Game 2
Here's a teaser for photos for the next few days, from Game 2 of the World Series.
The Prudential Center making its feelings know.
Dodger coach Dave Roberts joining his Red Sox teammates who finally broke the curse of the Bambino!
David Price delivers the first pitch under a full moon in upper right.
Justin Turner fouls one off.
Taking the pitch...
Dodger coach Dave Roberts joining his Red Sox teammates who finally broke the curse of the Bambino!
David Price delivers the first pitch under a full moon in upper right.
Justin Turner fouls one off.
Taking the pitch...
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Fascism, Fear, And Falsehoods
One of the most remarkable propaganda feats of the Republican party is how they consistently run on fear and racism but somehow their resulting election victories get touted as policy wins. Even more remarkable is how the party successfully runs against their own policy failures. It's been this way for decades.
Ronald Reagan opened his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of civil rights workers in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan. On the policy side, one of Reagan's criticism of Carter was the rising national debt. Of course, as President, Reagan cut taxes and proceeded to triple the national debt. George W. Bush took an actual budget surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton, passed another tax cut, and basically doubled the national debt, while leaving the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression to be dealt with by Barack Obama. Yet Republicans consistently used the increasing deficit and debt to run against Obama and the Democrats.
Donald Trump won election, with a massive dose of help from James Comey, running on a message largely based on racism and misogyny. Even so, that victory was, at least initially, attributed to his recognition of "economic anxiety" among the electorate. Subsequent research showed that analysis to be entirely false. Nevertheless, despite having raged against the "Obama debt", Trump and the Republicans again passed another enormous tax cut that is once again exploding the deficit and increasing the debt.
Of course, it should be no surprise that Republicans rail against debt, pass tax cuts that increase it, and then demand that America's safety net be decimated to fix it. That has been their MO for decades. Paul Ryan has made a career out of it. And it should be no surprise that Republicans are relying on racism and fear as their closing election argument. That, too, has been their MO for decades. What is new about 2016 and this election cycle is just how open the Republican party has become about its racism, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism, as well as the brazenness of the lies regarding their actual policies.
Steve King openly admits that he believes that Jews are funding the mass migration of Muslims and other minorities in order to create a "slow motion cultural suicide" for white Americans and Europeans, a theory known as the Great Replacement among white nationalists. Republican candidates across the country echo this anti-Semitic view, with ads that mix the images of immigrants and minorities with George Soros, claiming, as Trump does, that the Democratic candidate is a pawn of the globalist left. Other GOP ads attempt to tie Democratic candidates to terrorism purely based on the flimsiest of connections. Many of these ads are not from fringe PACs, but from the official arms of the Republican party. Trump himself decries the "globalists" and declares himself a "nationalist", using the thinly veiled code words of the alt-right.
Trump, of course, likes to mix his racist white nationalism with bald-faced lies. He declared that the "immigrant caravan", which is still hundreds of miles from the US border and is purely a foil for his racist rants, is filled with MS-13 members and Middle Eastern terrorists. Needless to say, there is no evidence for this and the preponderance of evidence from media actually embedded in this group of refugees indicates it is entirely false. Mike Pence, who will always carry the President's water when directed, quadrupled down on Trump's lie, saying "it is inconceivable that there are not people of Middle Eastern descent in a crowd of more than 7,000 people advancing toward our border...In the last fiscal year we apprehended more than 10 terrorists or suspected terrorists per day at our southern border from countries that are referred to in the lexicon as ‘other than Mexico’ ― that means from the Middle East region." That statement is just false and, in fact, Trump's own State Department admits that there is "no credible information that ANY member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the U.S."
Lies that stoke racial fear and division are nothing new for the GOP. Neither are lies about their actual policy positions, which are always told to hide the true agenda of cutting taxes and gutting the New Deal safety net. This year, that approach is typified by the lie of virtually every Republican candidate that they want to protect pre-existing conditions, having taken literally dozens of votes over the last eight years to strip those protections away. Candidates like Josh Hawley are part of an ongoing lawsuit to strip those protections away and yet he still has the temerity to say that he is interested in protecting them. The Trump administration just allowed state to introduce new health insurance plans without protections for pre-existing conditions and is also part of the lawsuit designed to gut those protections. Mitch McConnell has openly admitted that Republicans will try to repeal Obamacare and gut entitlements after the elections.
A corollary to the GOP's pre-existing conditions lie is that Democrats push for Medicare for All will actually reduce regular Medicare coverage. Besides the fact that there is no evidence for that reduction, most Democrats this year are not running on Medicare for All, although virtually every Republican accuses their opponent of supporting it. But it allows the Republicans to pull out that old chestnut, accusing the Democrats of supporting "SOCIALISM!" which, according to the administration, will turn our country into Venezuela.
But what is truly remarkable is how Trump and the GOP are running against their own failures. Running on protecting pre-existing conditions is in its own way an example of this tactic. Trump promised to secure the border but now he claims that it is going to be overrun by criminals and terrorists. Trump and the Republicans passed an enormous tax cut that was supposed to allow families to buy a new car or renovate their kitchen. That was a lie, and Trump has basically admitted as much by just creating a new, even more brazen lie that he will somehow institute a new 10% tax cut for middle class before the election.
The Republican party hasn't had a new policy idea since Ronald Reagan and supply side economics. Tax cuts and gutting the social safety net are the only policies they actively pursue. Their decades-long cries of "socialism" now fall on deaf ear among the young who are increasingly open to that approach. The GOP is a dying, aging party that can only win elections with lies, fear, racism, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. The real question facing the country is what this increasingly radical minority party will do if and when these tactics stop working.
Ronald Reagan opened his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of civil rights workers in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan. On the policy side, one of Reagan's criticism of Carter was the rising national debt. Of course, as President, Reagan cut taxes and proceeded to triple the national debt. George W. Bush took an actual budget surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton, passed another tax cut, and basically doubled the national debt, while leaving the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression to be dealt with by Barack Obama. Yet Republicans consistently used the increasing deficit and debt to run against Obama and the Democrats.
Donald Trump won election, with a massive dose of help from James Comey, running on a message largely based on racism and misogyny. Even so, that victory was, at least initially, attributed to his recognition of "economic anxiety" among the electorate. Subsequent research showed that analysis to be entirely false. Nevertheless, despite having raged against the "Obama debt", Trump and the Republicans again passed another enormous tax cut that is once again exploding the deficit and increasing the debt.
Of course, it should be no surprise that Republicans rail against debt, pass tax cuts that increase it, and then demand that America's safety net be decimated to fix it. That has been their MO for decades. Paul Ryan has made a career out of it. And it should be no surprise that Republicans are relying on racism and fear as their closing election argument. That, too, has been their MO for decades. What is new about 2016 and this election cycle is just how open the Republican party has become about its racism, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism, as well as the brazenness of the lies regarding their actual policies.
Steve King openly admits that he believes that Jews are funding the mass migration of Muslims and other minorities in order to create a "slow motion cultural suicide" for white Americans and Europeans, a theory known as the Great Replacement among white nationalists. Republican candidates across the country echo this anti-Semitic view, with ads that mix the images of immigrants and minorities with George Soros, claiming, as Trump does, that the Democratic candidate is a pawn of the globalist left. Other GOP ads attempt to tie Democratic candidates to terrorism purely based on the flimsiest of connections. Many of these ads are not from fringe PACs, but from the official arms of the Republican party. Trump himself decries the "globalists" and declares himself a "nationalist", using the thinly veiled code words of the alt-right.
Trump, of course, likes to mix his racist white nationalism with bald-faced lies. He declared that the "immigrant caravan", which is still hundreds of miles from the US border and is purely a foil for his racist rants, is filled with MS-13 members and Middle Eastern terrorists. Needless to say, there is no evidence for this and the preponderance of evidence from media actually embedded in this group of refugees indicates it is entirely false. Mike Pence, who will always carry the President's water when directed, quadrupled down on Trump's lie, saying "it is inconceivable that there are not people of Middle Eastern descent in a crowd of more than 7,000 people advancing toward our border...In the last fiscal year we apprehended more than 10 terrorists or suspected terrorists per day at our southern border from countries that are referred to in the lexicon as ‘other than Mexico’ ― that means from the Middle East region." That statement is just false and, in fact, Trump's own State Department admits that there is "no credible information that ANY member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the U.S."
Lies that stoke racial fear and division are nothing new for the GOP. Neither are lies about their actual policy positions, which are always told to hide the true agenda of cutting taxes and gutting the New Deal safety net. This year, that approach is typified by the lie of virtually every Republican candidate that they want to protect pre-existing conditions, having taken literally dozens of votes over the last eight years to strip those protections away. Candidates like Josh Hawley are part of an ongoing lawsuit to strip those protections away and yet he still has the temerity to say that he is interested in protecting them. The Trump administration just allowed state to introduce new health insurance plans without protections for pre-existing conditions and is also part of the lawsuit designed to gut those protections. Mitch McConnell has openly admitted that Republicans will try to repeal Obamacare and gut entitlements after the elections.
A corollary to the GOP's pre-existing conditions lie is that Democrats push for Medicare for All will actually reduce regular Medicare coverage. Besides the fact that there is no evidence for that reduction, most Democrats this year are not running on Medicare for All, although virtually every Republican accuses their opponent of supporting it. But it allows the Republicans to pull out that old chestnut, accusing the Democrats of supporting "SOCIALISM!" which, according to the administration, will turn our country into Venezuela.
But what is truly remarkable is how Trump and the GOP are running against their own failures. Running on protecting pre-existing conditions is in its own way an example of this tactic. Trump promised to secure the border but now he claims that it is going to be overrun by criminals and terrorists. Trump and the Republicans passed an enormous tax cut that was supposed to allow families to buy a new car or renovate their kitchen. That was a lie, and Trump has basically admitted as much by just creating a new, even more brazen lie that he will somehow institute a new 10% tax cut for middle class before the election.
The Republican party hasn't had a new policy idea since Ronald Reagan and supply side economics. Tax cuts and gutting the social safety net are the only policies they actively pursue. Their decades-long cries of "socialism" now fall on deaf ear among the young who are increasingly open to that approach. The GOP is a dying, aging party that can only win elections with lies, fear, racism, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. The real question facing the country is what this increasingly radical minority party will do if and when these tactics stop working.
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
The Media Still Doesn't Know How To Deal With Trump
It is strikingly apparent that the media is still unable to adjust to the new world of constant and brazen lies which mirror the tactics of autocratic leaders that Trump and the Republican party has brought to American politics. In fact, despite recognizing their inability to properly cover Trump, the coverage in most of the media keeps on repeating the same mistakes that were made ever since Trump became a factor in the 2016 election campaign. Certainly, there are plenty of stories that document and highlight Trump's lies. But for the most part, headlines and ledes simply repeat the lies that Trump and his administration tell and rely on the reader to delve well into the story to see where those lies are refuted, if they get refuted at all. In addition, because Trump can create so many news cycles in just one day, the media constantly finds itself regurgitating his lies and outrages before its analysis of those lies can take hold.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the local media's response to Trump's rallies. As Daniel Dale says, "No matter how offensive or plain weird Trump is at a rally, the visuals and headlines he gets in the local media are almost always good for him -- it's 'president comes to town, excites faithful' or 'president likes local Republican, slams local Democrat' almost 100% of the time". But that kind of superficiality and cowardice extends to the national media as well. Take a look at how Trump's fictional 10% tax cut for the middle class before the midterms is being carried by national news organizations. The headlines either simply regurgitate this fantasy plan or actually misstate what it is in order to pretend that Trump is making a serious proposal. Or look at how his baseless claims that the caravan of refugees was filled with terrorists was treated as front page news.
This trend to ignore reality was readily apparent in yesterday's cringe-worthy first-ever in-depth interview with Jared Kushner conducted by Van Jones. Jared Kushner lied on his financial disclosure forms multiple times. He attempted to set up a secret back channel to Russia outside the purview of US intelligence spending. He recommended firing James Comey. It has been reported that four countries believe that Kushner could be manipulated due to his inexperience and his company's financial difficulties. MBS has stated that he has Kushner in his pocket.
So Jones spent the first third of the 45 minute interview discussing Kushner's efforts at prison reform. That effort has passed the House but has not yet been approved by the Senate. Trump himself has waffled back and forth in his support for prison reform. Yet Jones marveled how Kushner could get Pelosi and Trump to agree on a bill, which it is at present unclear that they actually do, as though prison and sentencing reform has never been a Democratic priority.
After that bizarre beginning, Jones finally pivoted to talking about Saudi Arabia and the Khashoggi murder, although I don't believe he ever mentioned the reporter and dissident by name. Kushner deflected all questions on Saudi Arabia as saying the administration was still in a "fact-finding" mode. Jones neglected to inquire about whether the US had prior intelligence on what the Saudis intended to do with Khashoggi or inquire about Saudi investments in Kushner's or Trump's businesses. As an afterthought, Jones asked about Kushner's Mideast peace plan which has yet to be rolled out and again Kushner largely deflected the question. So far, at least, the actions of the Trump administration have been to give the Israelis everything they want and deny the Palestinians everything they need. Jones explored none of that.
The last third of the interview were filled with even more softballs about trade, how it was to work with Trump, and what little anecdote would surprise us about Trump. This was a sickening and sycophant interview and one would think that there was definitely a quid-pro-quo for such a softball interview. But if that was the case, then CNN's viewers and the public have a right to know.
I know I'm picking on Jones but primarily because the interview was yesterday. Leslie Stahl's 60 Minutes interview may have had far more substance but was in many ways just as ineffective. Yet it was treated by some in the press as a hard-hitting interview that showed how to deal with Trump. Just like trying to cover the barrage of Trump's tweets, Stahl spent the whole interview jumping from subject to subject and never confronting Trump's blather and deflections. Rather than asking specific questions, Stahl provided open-ended queries that allowed Trump to fall into the monologue mode that he displays at his rallies and Stahl struggled to ever get him back on track. Remarkably, Stahl didn't even ask a question about the recent and incredibly detailed NY Times report that showed that the Trump family had engaged in decades-long and massive tax fraud.
As Daniel D'Addario writes, "So many of Stahl’s questions seemed premised on the notion that Trump could be brought to reason though earnest questioning that treaded somewhat lightly — but that signaled to viewers at home a certain set of values. This would have been a good playbook for a conservative-but-not-category-busting President Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, perhaps; all players could say their piece, and all could go home relatively unscathed. But even as Trump was unwilling to play along, the questions got no harder." And that pretty much sums up the problem the media continues to have with Trump, playing by the old rules where Trump plays by his own.
It's not like the media isn't aware of this issue and the solutions are out there and easy to adapt. Stop repeating Trump's lies in headlines and ledes. Stop letting Trump control the news cycle. Every press gaggle, every rally, and every outrageous tweet is not necessarily news but more often than not a provocation or deflection. Back in 2016, Robert Schlesinger of US News and World Report laid out the ground work for the new Trumpian environment. "Instead of assuming that Trump generally tells the truth but investigating statements that seem like they might be lies – standard operating procedure for most pols – reporters on the fact-check beat should flip the script and assume that if Trump is making a provable statement it falls on the error-to-lie spectrum...Run any Trump television appearance on, say, a five-minute tape delay and then correct his misstatements on a running, real-time basis...Bully the bully. Belying his self-professed image as a straight-talker, Trump can be incredibly slippery in interviews. One of his favorite techniques is to not answer questions with a spray of non sequiturs and irrelevancies, counting on reporters eventually moving on...Very simply include a disclaimer with any Trump appearance or utterance...saying that he lies or is otherwise in error a substantial amount of the time".
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, believes that the paper should only use the word "lie" infrequently "because if we use it all the time it loses its meaning". Propagandists rely on repetition. To fight propaganda requires being equally repetitive. Apparently he has quickly forgotten how badly the Times repetitive stories about Hillary Clinton's email practices damaged her campaign. And he apparently is unaware that the Republican party has propagated lies about their actual legislative intentions for decades through constant repetition that outlets like the Times gave credence to and are amplified by Fox News on the conservative propaganda machine. And he must have no knowledge of history and how demagogues and autocrats manage to gain power using lies and false provocations and then use that power to stifle an independent press.
Most of the major media outlets have yet to fully come to grips with their abject failure in the 2016 election. And they are by and large repeating many of the same mistakes again this year. Yes, there is a clear increase in articles that detail just how much lies and fear are driving the Trump and Republican message as we get closer to the election. But those analyses come out after the media itself has given the lies and fear broad currency. Depending on the results of this election, it may be too late for the media, and for us, to get it right.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the local media's response to Trump's rallies. As Daniel Dale says, "No matter how offensive or plain weird Trump is at a rally, the visuals and headlines he gets in the local media are almost always good for him -- it's 'president comes to town, excites faithful' or 'president likes local Republican, slams local Democrat' almost 100% of the time". But that kind of superficiality and cowardice extends to the national media as well. Take a look at how Trump's fictional 10% tax cut for the middle class before the midterms is being carried by national news organizations. The headlines either simply regurgitate this fantasy plan or actually misstate what it is in order to pretend that Trump is making a serious proposal. Or look at how his baseless claims that the caravan of refugees was filled with terrorists was treated as front page news.
This trend to ignore reality was readily apparent in yesterday's cringe-worthy first-ever in-depth interview with Jared Kushner conducted by Van Jones. Jared Kushner lied on his financial disclosure forms multiple times. He attempted to set up a secret back channel to Russia outside the purview of US intelligence spending. He recommended firing James Comey. It has been reported that four countries believe that Kushner could be manipulated due to his inexperience and his company's financial difficulties. MBS has stated that he has Kushner in his pocket.
So Jones spent the first third of the 45 minute interview discussing Kushner's efforts at prison reform. That effort has passed the House but has not yet been approved by the Senate. Trump himself has waffled back and forth in his support for prison reform. Yet Jones marveled how Kushner could get Pelosi and Trump to agree on a bill, which it is at present unclear that they actually do, as though prison and sentencing reform has never been a Democratic priority.
After that bizarre beginning, Jones finally pivoted to talking about Saudi Arabia and the Khashoggi murder, although I don't believe he ever mentioned the reporter and dissident by name. Kushner deflected all questions on Saudi Arabia as saying the administration was still in a "fact-finding" mode. Jones neglected to inquire about whether the US had prior intelligence on what the Saudis intended to do with Khashoggi or inquire about Saudi investments in Kushner's or Trump's businesses. As an afterthought, Jones asked about Kushner's Mideast peace plan which has yet to be rolled out and again Kushner largely deflected the question. So far, at least, the actions of the Trump administration have been to give the Israelis everything they want and deny the Palestinians everything they need. Jones explored none of that.
The last third of the interview were filled with even more softballs about trade, how it was to work with Trump, and what little anecdote would surprise us about Trump. This was a sickening and sycophant interview and one would think that there was definitely a quid-pro-quo for such a softball interview. But if that was the case, then CNN's viewers and the public have a right to know.
I know I'm picking on Jones but primarily because the interview was yesterday. Leslie Stahl's 60 Minutes interview may have had far more substance but was in many ways just as ineffective. Yet it was treated by some in the press as a hard-hitting interview that showed how to deal with Trump. Just like trying to cover the barrage of Trump's tweets, Stahl spent the whole interview jumping from subject to subject and never confronting Trump's blather and deflections. Rather than asking specific questions, Stahl provided open-ended queries that allowed Trump to fall into the monologue mode that he displays at his rallies and Stahl struggled to ever get him back on track. Remarkably, Stahl didn't even ask a question about the recent and incredibly detailed NY Times report that showed that the Trump family had engaged in decades-long and massive tax fraud.
As Daniel D'Addario writes, "So many of Stahl’s questions seemed premised on the notion that Trump could be brought to reason though earnest questioning that treaded somewhat lightly — but that signaled to viewers at home a certain set of values. This would have been a good playbook for a conservative-but-not-category-busting President Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, perhaps; all players could say their piece, and all could go home relatively unscathed. But even as Trump was unwilling to play along, the questions got no harder." And that pretty much sums up the problem the media continues to have with Trump, playing by the old rules where Trump plays by his own.
It's not like the media isn't aware of this issue and the solutions are out there and easy to adapt. Stop repeating Trump's lies in headlines and ledes. Stop letting Trump control the news cycle. Every press gaggle, every rally, and every outrageous tweet is not necessarily news but more often than not a provocation or deflection. Back in 2016, Robert Schlesinger of US News and World Report laid out the ground work for the new Trumpian environment. "Instead of assuming that Trump generally tells the truth but investigating statements that seem like they might be lies – standard operating procedure for most pols – reporters on the fact-check beat should flip the script and assume that if Trump is making a provable statement it falls on the error-to-lie spectrum...Run any Trump television appearance on, say, a five-minute tape delay and then correct his misstatements on a running, real-time basis...Bully the bully. Belying his self-professed image as a straight-talker, Trump can be incredibly slippery in interviews. One of his favorite techniques is to not answer questions with a spray of non sequiturs and irrelevancies, counting on reporters eventually moving on...Very simply include a disclaimer with any Trump appearance or utterance...saying that he lies or is otherwise in error a substantial amount of the time".
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, believes that the paper should only use the word "lie" infrequently "because if we use it all the time it loses its meaning". Propagandists rely on repetition. To fight propaganda requires being equally repetitive. Apparently he has quickly forgotten how badly the Times repetitive stories about Hillary Clinton's email practices damaged her campaign. And he apparently is unaware that the Republican party has propagated lies about their actual legislative intentions for decades through constant repetition that outlets like the Times gave credence to and are amplified by Fox News on the conservative propaganda machine. And he must have no knowledge of history and how demagogues and autocrats manage to gain power using lies and false provocations and then use that power to stifle an independent press.
Most of the major media outlets have yet to fully come to grips with their abject failure in the 2016 election. And they are by and large repeating many of the same mistakes again this year. Yes, there is a clear increase in articles that detail just how much lies and fear are driving the Trump and Republican message as we get closer to the election. But those analyses come out after the media itself has given the lies and fear broad currency. Depending on the results of this election, it may be too late for the media, and for us, to get it right.
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Astronomy Adventure - Craters Of the Southern Moon
Photo of the crater-pocked southern area of the Moon. The crater with the central peak in the middle of the photo is Maurolycus, with the rims of the craters Faraday and Stofler just catching the sunlight to its immediate right.
Technical details:
Scope: Starblast 4.5; tracking on
Magnification: ~200x
Camera: iPhone6 using NightCap Pro; Low ISO
Friday, October 19, 2018
Trump's War On Legal Immigrants
While much of the focus has rightly been on the crimes and abuses against undocumented immigrants by the Trump administration, the attacks on legal immigrants also continues. In fact, the attack on legal immigration began almost immediately, with the institution of the Muslim ban which in practice prevented certain green card holders and legal residents from returning to the United States.
Trump has cut the number of refugees that the US will take in to record lows. He has revoked protected status for Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Hondurans, Haitians, Sudanese, and Nepalese US residents. The immigration sweeps by ICE increasingly pick up legal US residents and even US citizens. The State Department is denying Hispanic US citizens passport renewals and requiring absurd levels of documentation from them. The administration has set up a denaturalization task force to ferret out those who may have made some misrepresentations on their citizenship applications. And now Trump has just issued a new rule that will make it virtually impossible for those who have ever received government assistance to receive green cards.
In some of these cases, the courts have intervened and struck down the Trump administration's actions. But the intent of the administration is clear and that intent is being carried out in the states now as well.
In Louisiana, the state passed a new law that would require any foreign-born person who wishes to get married to produce an unexpired visa as well as a birth certificate. The ostensible reason for this is "marriage fraud" which is about as big a myth as "voter fraud". Federal law already states that a person's immigration status can not be used to deny them a marriage license. But the requirement of a birth certificate is even more venal. For many foreign-born citizens, whether current US citizens or not, obtaining a birth certificate is virtually impossible, especially if they were born in a war zone, as is true of many Southeast Asian immigrants in Louisiana.
Of course, Trump's continual harping on the fact that Jamal Kashoggi is not a US citizen and his refusal to even acknowledge or condemn his murder and actively engaging in its cover-up is in its own way, another attack on legal immigrants. Sadly, it will only get worse.
Trump has cut the number of refugees that the US will take in to record lows. He has revoked protected status for Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Hondurans, Haitians, Sudanese, and Nepalese US residents. The immigration sweeps by ICE increasingly pick up legal US residents and even US citizens. The State Department is denying Hispanic US citizens passport renewals and requiring absurd levels of documentation from them. The administration has set up a denaturalization task force to ferret out those who may have made some misrepresentations on their citizenship applications. And now Trump has just issued a new rule that will make it virtually impossible for those who have ever received government assistance to receive green cards.
In some of these cases, the courts have intervened and struck down the Trump administration's actions. But the intent of the administration is clear and that intent is being carried out in the states now as well.
In Louisiana, the state passed a new law that would require any foreign-born person who wishes to get married to produce an unexpired visa as well as a birth certificate. The ostensible reason for this is "marriage fraud" which is about as big a myth as "voter fraud". Federal law already states that a person's immigration status can not be used to deny them a marriage license. But the requirement of a birth certificate is even more venal. For many foreign-born citizens, whether current US citizens or not, obtaining a birth certificate is virtually impossible, especially if they were born in a war zone, as is true of many Southeast Asian immigrants in Louisiana.
Of course, Trump's continual harping on the fact that Jamal Kashoggi is not a US citizen and his refusal to even acknowledge or condemn his murder and actively engaging in its cover-up is in its own way, another attack on legal immigrants. Sadly, it will only get worse.
Thursday, October 18, 2018
The Brainwashing Of The Judicial Branch
The conservative effort to control the judiciary has been a decades-long effort. The two biggest groups in making that effort possible are the Federalist Society and the Heritage Society. Those two organizations were actually the ones who compiled the list of Supreme Court nominee from which Trump would choose. In fact, every confirmed Supreme Court justice nominated by the last three Republican presidents has either been a member of or approved by the Federalist Society. These two organizations have literally been grooming, in the best and worst sense of that word, conservative young lawyers for decades.
That grooming begins in the law schools across this country. Part of that effort is, or now, was, the Federal Clerkship Training Academy run by the Heritage Foundation. A select group of applicants would have the opportunity to attend an all expense paid three day seminar focused on "originalism, textualism, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights and other substantive legal and practical subject matter". The application process indicated the conservative slant of the attendees that would be chosen by including questions such as how they would describe their concept of originalism.
There is certainly nothing wrong with running a program for conservative lawyers aspiring to become law clerks. But other aspects of the program raise serious questions. First, the donors were anonymous and the program made clear that, whoever they were, they were making "a significant financial investment in each and every attendee". In addition, applicants were told that the program's teaching materials must remain private and were required to pledge that whatever they learned at the seminar could not be used "for any purpose contrary to the mission or interest of the Heritage Foundation." So much for the concept of judicial independence. As one law professor noted, the conditions and secrecy around this seminar "reads like a kind of indoctrination".
In addition, Heritage refused to divulge the names of the law professors and sitting federal appeals court justices that it touted would be addressing this seminar. It is hard to believe that any current justice would sign on to a program with these kind of restrictions, even anonymously, but such is the level of ethics in the conservative judiciary these days.
Unfortunately, these kind of programs really work in slanting the judiciary. A new study shows that judges with conservative law clerks end up making conservative decisions 4% more of the time than when they had liberal clerks. Another study of the impact of the Manne seminars run out of the libertarian-leaning George Mason Law School during the 1980s and 1990s showed an even more profound effect. The seminars were paid for by the top corporations of the time and focused on economics in a way that had "favorable implications for private property and free markets". Over time, nearly half of all federal judges took these two week seminars. The study found they had a profound effect on the way those judges decided cases.
According to the study, "We find that, post Manne attendance, judges render conservative verdicts in economics-relevant cases. Further, using the 100% sample of machine-coded circuit cases, we find that Manne attendees subsequently are more likely to rule against regulatory agencies, for example the EPA and NLRB….. We show that the difference in sentencing harshness between Manne and non-Manne judges is highest after the 2005 Booker decision gave more discretion to judges in sentencing...Economics likely changed how judges perceived the consequences of their decisions. If you teach judges that markets work, they deregulate government. If you teach judges that deterrence works, they become harsher to criminal defendants." Of course, that is exactly the outcome that those big corporate donors were paying for.
The Federalist Society was started in 1982 by Ed Meese, Robert Bork, and others with the express purpose of imposing their conservative and libertarian ideology on the country's judicial system. It has been a near 40 year effort that has culminated with the confirmations of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, control of the Supreme Court because of the refusal to seat Merrick Garland, and the packing of the lower courts by Trump because of the obstruction of Mitch McConnell. It was a long road, but the neutering of the America's independent judiciary is nearly complete.
That grooming begins in the law schools across this country. Part of that effort is, or now, was, the Federal Clerkship Training Academy run by the Heritage Foundation. A select group of applicants would have the opportunity to attend an all expense paid three day seminar focused on "originalism, textualism, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights and other substantive legal and practical subject matter". The application process indicated the conservative slant of the attendees that would be chosen by including questions such as how they would describe their concept of originalism.
There is certainly nothing wrong with running a program for conservative lawyers aspiring to become law clerks. But other aspects of the program raise serious questions. First, the donors were anonymous and the program made clear that, whoever they were, they were making "a significant financial investment in each and every attendee". In addition, applicants were told that the program's teaching materials must remain private and were required to pledge that whatever they learned at the seminar could not be used "for any purpose contrary to the mission or interest of the Heritage Foundation." So much for the concept of judicial independence. As one law professor noted, the conditions and secrecy around this seminar "reads like a kind of indoctrination".
In addition, Heritage refused to divulge the names of the law professors and sitting federal appeals court justices that it touted would be addressing this seminar. It is hard to believe that any current justice would sign on to a program with these kind of restrictions, even anonymously, but such is the level of ethics in the conservative judiciary these days.
Unfortunately, these kind of programs really work in slanting the judiciary. A new study shows that judges with conservative law clerks end up making conservative decisions 4% more of the time than when they had liberal clerks. Another study of the impact of the Manne seminars run out of the libertarian-leaning George Mason Law School during the 1980s and 1990s showed an even more profound effect. The seminars were paid for by the top corporations of the time and focused on economics in a way that had "favorable implications for private property and free markets". Over time, nearly half of all federal judges took these two week seminars. The study found they had a profound effect on the way those judges decided cases.
According to the study, "We find that, post Manne attendance, judges render conservative verdicts in economics-relevant cases. Further, using the 100% sample of machine-coded circuit cases, we find that Manne attendees subsequently are more likely to rule against regulatory agencies, for example the EPA and NLRB….. We show that the difference in sentencing harshness between Manne and non-Manne judges is highest after the 2005 Booker decision gave more discretion to judges in sentencing...Economics likely changed how judges perceived the consequences of their decisions. If you teach judges that markets work, they deregulate government. If you teach judges that deterrence works, they become harsher to criminal defendants." Of course, that is exactly the outcome that those big corporate donors were paying for.
The Federalist Society was started in 1982 by Ed Meese, Robert Bork, and others with the express purpose of imposing their conservative and libertarian ideology on the country's judicial system. It has been a near 40 year effort that has culminated with the confirmations of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, control of the Supreme Court because of the refusal to seat Merrick Garland, and the packing of the lower courts by Trump because of the obstruction of Mitch McConnell. It was a long road, but the neutering of the America's independent judiciary is nearly complete.
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Did Trump/Kushner Sign Off On Khashoggi Murder?
It appears that Trump, Kushner, and Pompeo are just going to try to get the Saudis to round up a few of the usual suspects and pin the Khashoggi murder on them. Pompeo pretty succinctly summarized the US position in a statement earlier today when he declared, "I don't want to discuss facts". Rather, he just wanted the Saudis to "have the opportunity to complete this investigation." In other words, we don't care what really happened, just that the Saudis come up with some remotely plausible explanation and then try to move on.
Certainly, the Turks have their own agenda here and it would be foolish take everything they say at face value. But if the rumored tapes that are in the Turks' possession have been passed on to the media already, even that pathetic fall-guy defense will be nearly impossible to pull off. It's clear that this was an assassination from the moment Khashoggi walked in the consulate. The defense was made even more difficult by other reports that identify at least four of the suspects identified by Turkey as having close connections to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), and a fifth holds a senior position in the Saudi Interior Ministry and would presumably only have acted on orders from above.
Trump claims that he doesn't want Khashoggi's murder to jeopardize the Saudi's agreement to buy $110 billion of US arms. But that $110 billion deal is just the usual Trump total fiction. In fact, the Saudis have only come close to committing to buy around $15 billion worth of arms and that deal has not even been closed. And Trump's rogue element defense is now implausible because of the presence of MBS' cronies and a two senior Saudi officials.
The more realistic reason why Trump is determined to defend and protect the Saudis revolves around the personal financial interests of both Kushner and Trump with that government. Trump has certainly relied on Saudi money to buy apartments in his buildings and even bail out his now struggling hotels. And MBS has reportedly bragged that he had Kushner "in his pocket". In fact, Kushner's close relationship with MBS concerned government officials early on. According to CNN, "Senior administration officials said Kushner's close relationship with bin Salman was an early cause for concern among career national security staffers, who worried off-the-books conversations with the young prince could lead to misunderstandings or worse".
But even that hardly explains the Saudis ham-handed and seemingly inept response to the murder. The initial response, which they still haven't officially repudiated, was totally implausible, namely that Khashoggi left the embassy and they have no idea what happened to him. It is hard to believe that the Saudis haven't yet come up with a more plausible theory. They could have said he died of a heart attack in the embassy. They could have said it was rendition gone bad. But no, their attitude from the beginning seems to be "yes, we killed him and what are you going to do about it". The details leaked by the Turks certainly support that conclusion. The execution team was waiting for Khashoggi when he arrived and he was executed in front of a top Saudi diplomat.
What's equally hard to understand is that MBS is very attuned to his image as a reformer in the US. He spent millions cultivating that image and it seems hard to believe he would throw that all away over some pesky dissident reporter. In addition, the Saudis rely on US arms and intelligence to pursue their criminal war in Yemen. Again, why would MBS risk losing that support over some exiled dissident. He also had to know that killing Khashoggi, maybe not a US citizen but considered a US person under law, as well as being a Washington Post contributor, was bound to create problems.
One theory that explains MBS' actions and his response to the killing is that he believes that he has so much leverage over Trump that he can do whatever he wants. Sending his security detail and even calling in outside cleaners to come to embassy right before the Turks searched it indicate the impunity with which the Saudis approached this.
Another theory, which certainly has less supporting evidence, is that MBS believes that he had a sign off from Kushner and/or Trump to go ahead with this killing. That would certainly explain Trump's desperation to provide cover for MBS as well as MBS' willingness to seemingly let Trump twist in the wind on this issue. The fact that US intelligence had prior knowledge about a Saudi attempt to detain Khashoggi yet the US government did not tell the Saudis to stand down on this plan adds some possible credence to this theory. In addition, the fact that the target was a Washington Post reporter who was not a US citizen certainly fits in with Trump's anti-press rhetoric.
Assuming that theory is true, and that is certainly a big if, then it is also possible that Turkey may have also intercepted Saudi communications that confirmed the US gave the go-ahead for Khashoggi's killing. If so, Trump could be being blackmailed by both the Saudis and the Turks. As with Saudi Arabia, Trump has financial interests in Turkey which further clouds the situation. Certainly, the fact that the Turks have leaked details that contradict every cover story that Trump tries to float for the Saudis indicate that they too are interested in squeezing Trump.
Admittedly, the evidence for these theories is flimsy at best and, as noted above, we are largely relying on details provided by the Turks who have their own agenda with regards to Saudi Arabia and Middle East politics in general. But the theory that Trump and/or Kushner actually signed off on the Khashoggi killing explains everyone's actions as well as any other theory we have seen yet.
UPDATE: Here are three other additional pieces of information that can be construed as supporting this hypothesis. First, Kushner has reportedly previously turned over information on Saudi dissidents that he learned from classified briefings to MBS. Second, Nikki Haley's shock resignation was actually submitted just hours after Khashoggi's death was reported and long before Trump's kowtowing began, possibly indicating she also knew of the Saudi's plan before it occurred. Lastly, it appears that, even today, Kushner believes that this incident will just blow over, again indicating he would not have thought that giving the OK for Khashoggi's murder, a US resident and Washington Post contributor, would be any big deal.
Certainly, the Turks have their own agenda here and it would be foolish take everything they say at face value. But if the rumored tapes that are in the Turks' possession have been passed on to the media already, even that pathetic fall-guy defense will be nearly impossible to pull off. It's clear that this was an assassination from the moment Khashoggi walked in the consulate. The defense was made even more difficult by other reports that identify at least four of the suspects identified by Turkey as having close connections to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), and a fifth holds a senior position in the Saudi Interior Ministry and would presumably only have acted on orders from above.
Trump claims that he doesn't want Khashoggi's murder to jeopardize the Saudi's agreement to buy $110 billion of US arms. But that $110 billion deal is just the usual Trump total fiction. In fact, the Saudis have only come close to committing to buy around $15 billion worth of arms and that deal has not even been closed. And Trump's rogue element defense is now implausible because of the presence of MBS' cronies and a two senior Saudi officials.
The more realistic reason why Trump is determined to defend and protect the Saudis revolves around the personal financial interests of both Kushner and Trump with that government. Trump has certainly relied on Saudi money to buy apartments in his buildings and even bail out his now struggling hotels. And MBS has reportedly bragged that he had Kushner "in his pocket". In fact, Kushner's close relationship with MBS concerned government officials early on. According to CNN, "Senior administration officials said Kushner's close relationship with bin Salman was an early cause for concern among career national security staffers, who worried off-the-books conversations with the young prince could lead to misunderstandings or worse".
But even that hardly explains the Saudis ham-handed and seemingly inept response to the murder. The initial response, which they still haven't officially repudiated, was totally implausible, namely that Khashoggi left the embassy and they have no idea what happened to him. It is hard to believe that the Saudis haven't yet come up with a more plausible theory. They could have said he died of a heart attack in the embassy. They could have said it was rendition gone bad. But no, their attitude from the beginning seems to be "yes, we killed him and what are you going to do about it". The details leaked by the Turks certainly support that conclusion. The execution team was waiting for Khashoggi when he arrived and he was executed in front of a top Saudi diplomat.
What's equally hard to understand is that MBS is very attuned to his image as a reformer in the US. He spent millions cultivating that image and it seems hard to believe he would throw that all away over some pesky dissident reporter. In addition, the Saudis rely on US arms and intelligence to pursue their criminal war in Yemen. Again, why would MBS risk losing that support over some exiled dissident. He also had to know that killing Khashoggi, maybe not a US citizen but considered a US person under law, as well as being a Washington Post contributor, was bound to create problems.
One theory that explains MBS' actions and his response to the killing is that he believes that he has so much leverage over Trump that he can do whatever he wants. Sending his security detail and even calling in outside cleaners to come to embassy right before the Turks searched it indicate the impunity with which the Saudis approached this.
Another theory, which certainly has less supporting evidence, is that MBS believes that he had a sign off from Kushner and/or Trump to go ahead with this killing. That would certainly explain Trump's desperation to provide cover for MBS as well as MBS' willingness to seemingly let Trump twist in the wind on this issue. The fact that US intelligence had prior knowledge about a Saudi attempt to detain Khashoggi yet the US government did not tell the Saudis to stand down on this plan adds some possible credence to this theory. In addition, the fact that the target was a Washington Post reporter who was not a US citizen certainly fits in with Trump's anti-press rhetoric.
Assuming that theory is true, and that is certainly a big if, then it is also possible that Turkey may have also intercepted Saudi communications that confirmed the US gave the go-ahead for Khashoggi's killing. If so, Trump could be being blackmailed by both the Saudis and the Turks. As with Saudi Arabia, Trump has financial interests in Turkey which further clouds the situation. Certainly, the fact that the Turks have leaked details that contradict every cover story that Trump tries to float for the Saudis indicate that they too are interested in squeezing Trump.
Admittedly, the evidence for these theories is flimsy at best and, as noted above, we are largely relying on details provided by the Turks who have their own agenda with regards to Saudi Arabia and Middle East politics in general. But the theory that Trump and/or Kushner actually signed off on the Khashoggi killing explains everyone's actions as well as any other theory we have seen yet.
UPDATE: Here are three other additional pieces of information that can be construed as supporting this hypothesis. First, Kushner has reportedly previously turned over information on Saudi dissidents that he learned from classified briefings to MBS. Second, Nikki Haley's shock resignation was actually submitted just hours after Khashoggi's death was reported and long before Trump's kowtowing began, possibly indicating she also knew of the Saudi's plan before it occurred. Lastly, it appears that, even today, Kushner believes that this incident will just blow over, again indicating he would not have thought that giving the OK for Khashoggi's murder, a US resident and Washington Post contributor, would be any big deal.
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Vulture Capitalism And The Pillaging Of America
Sears, the iconic American retailer for over a century, filed for bankruptcy yesterday, a victim more of the vulture capitalist approach of its hedge fund manager CEO, Eddie Lampert, than of the changing and challenging retail environment. At the same time, it is also a prime example of the failure of corporate governance in the post-Reagan era.
Lampert got his start at Goldman Sachs, working in the risk arbitrage division overseen by Robert Freeman, who was arrested and pleaded guilty to insider trading while Lampert was there. That incident apparently prompted Lampert to leave the firm and set up his own hedge fund, ESL, at the ripe old age of 25. ESL had a string of successful investments, such as AutoZone and AutoNation, some of which was the result of the usual hedge fund/private equity management tactic of cutting investment and personnel and driving up the stock price with stock buybacks.
ESL and Lampert tried the same approach when it bought Kmart out of bankruptcy in 2003. In 2005, he merged it with Sears in an attempt to compete with WalMart and Target. Over the next decade, Lampert would lay off 175,000 employees and destroy the company.
Initially, ESL's strategy appeared to be successful, at least by the Wall Street focused financial metrics that Lampert believed should be the standard for the company. In 2006, EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) increased by nearly 18%, from the baseline of $2.524 billion at the time of the merger, and the stock soared 45% to $156. In 2007, EBITDA soared to $3.657 billion, prompting Lampert to boast that he was proving you can "cut your way to success". Lampert wrote in his 2007 letter to investors, "Unless we believe we will receive an adequate return on investment, we will not spend money on capital expenditures to build new stores or upgrade our existing base simply because our competitors do. If share repurchases or acquisitions appear to be more productive, then we will allocate capital to those options appropriately."
Not surprisingly, as the stores deteriorated from lack of investment and employee morale faltered because of continued layoffs and Lampert's decision to pit the various Sears' units in competition with each other, sales started to drop precipitously. In 2008, EBITDA dropped a shocking 44% to barely over $2 billion. Lampert's response was not to invest in fixing the problems at the firm but to break the company into five separate units in preparation for selling them off to generate cash for the company. But he continued his policy of massive stock buybacks to keep the stock price elevated. Between 2005 and 2010, Lampert spent $5.8 billion a share repurchases while Sears earnings during that same period only totaled $3.8 billion.
By 2012, EBITDA had turned negative and Lampert was beginning to basically liquidate Sears' assets, essentially selling the valuable commodities of a public company to private and public firms where ESL had ownership interests. As one hedge fund manager described it, "Eddie has orchestrated for himself, and for the benefit of shareholders, the most protracted liquidation in history". The Land's End brand was sold in 2015. Last year, the company's most valuable brand, Craftsman tools, was sold off to Stanley Black & Decker.
But by far Lampert's biggest grab of Sears' assets was what he did with the real estate the company owned. Lampert sold those real estate assets off to Seritage Growth Properties, who then agreed to lease those stores back to Sears. The sale raised $2.7 billion for Sears which was largely used to pay off Sear's debt, some of which was owed to Lampert's ESL fund. Lampert is Seritage's chairman and the firm is 40% owned by ESL. This move so outraged other investors that they filed a class action suit against Lampert's self dealing which ended up with Sears, not Lampert, paying out a $40 million settlement.
Sears will now enter bankruptcy where Lampert will still remain in nominal control of the company and benefit yet again from the distribution of the remains of the company he destroyed. He managed to take a company with a net worth of $12.7 billion in 2006 and turn it into a firm with a net worth of $-3.8 billion, a loss of $16.5 billion of net worth in a decade. He was able to do this because the company's board were Lampert cronies, including his college roommate and great friend Steve Mnuchin, who only had the interests of themselves and the shareholders, not the company as a whole, at heart.
America is not Sears and we will not be going bankrupt anytime soon, primarily because we have the ability to print dollars. But vulture capitalism was largely made possible by Republican tax and economic policies, so we should not be surprised to see those policies mimic vulture capitalism at the federal and state level.
Like Lampert's refusal to invest in the upkeep of Sears's stores, state and federal governments have underinvested in our nation's infrastructure for decades. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the US infrastructure a D+ rating in 2017 and estimates we will have to spend $4.5 trillion within the next decade on necessary repairs and upgrades. This underinvestment extends beyond infrastructure into education where things had so deteriorated that teachers in multiple red states went on strike for higher wages and more resources earlier this year.
When Sears was actually generating lots of cash, Lampert would use that money to engage in stock buybacks, increasing the share price and putting money in his own pockets and those of his shareholders. When the cash flow shrank, Lampert would try to "cut his way to success", laying off more employees and closing more stores. When even that became unsustainable, Lampert then sold off the firm's assets, again enriching himself and his shareholders.
Republicans have taken a similar path. When times are good, they will cut taxes for their wealthy benefactors. Bush did this in 2001 and Trump and the GOP just pulled off a double earlier this year, literally putting money in the pockets of their benefactors and the shareholder class by cutting corporate tax rates. The money that companies saved from the lower tax rates almost overwhelmingly went in to the share repurchase plans that Lampert loved.
When the debt or deficit rises, largely as a result of prior GOP policies, then Republicans declare that it's time to cut costs, meaning slashing Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security if they can get away with it. Just today, McConnell blamed the rising deficits on federal spending programs, citing those three programs as "driver of the debt by any objective standard." The fact that corporate tax receipts have fallen by one-third thanks to the tax cuts went unmentioned. And Republicans are always interested in selling off public lands and assets to private interests.
Eddie Lampert spent a decade pillaging Sears until there was nothing left. Republicans have spent nearly the last 40 years doing the same to America.
Lampert got his start at Goldman Sachs, working in the risk arbitrage division overseen by Robert Freeman, who was arrested and pleaded guilty to insider trading while Lampert was there. That incident apparently prompted Lampert to leave the firm and set up his own hedge fund, ESL, at the ripe old age of 25. ESL had a string of successful investments, such as AutoZone and AutoNation, some of which was the result of the usual hedge fund/private equity management tactic of cutting investment and personnel and driving up the stock price with stock buybacks.
ESL and Lampert tried the same approach when it bought Kmart out of bankruptcy in 2003. In 2005, he merged it with Sears in an attempt to compete with WalMart and Target. Over the next decade, Lampert would lay off 175,000 employees and destroy the company.
Initially, ESL's strategy appeared to be successful, at least by the Wall Street focused financial metrics that Lampert believed should be the standard for the company. In 2006, EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) increased by nearly 18%, from the baseline of $2.524 billion at the time of the merger, and the stock soared 45% to $156. In 2007, EBITDA soared to $3.657 billion, prompting Lampert to boast that he was proving you can "cut your way to success". Lampert wrote in his 2007 letter to investors, "Unless we believe we will receive an adequate return on investment, we will not spend money on capital expenditures to build new stores or upgrade our existing base simply because our competitors do. If share repurchases or acquisitions appear to be more productive, then we will allocate capital to those options appropriately."
Not surprisingly, as the stores deteriorated from lack of investment and employee morale faltered because of continued layoffs and Lampert's decision to pit the various Sears' units in competition with each other, sales started to drop precipitously. In 2008, EBITDA dropped a shocking 44% to barely over $2 billion. Lampert's response was not to invest in fixing the problems at the firm but to break the company into five separate units in preparation for selling them off to generate cash for the company. But he continued his policy of massive stock buybacks to keep the stock price elevated. Between 2005 and 2010, Lampert spent $5.8 billion a share repurchases while Sears earnings during that same period only totaled $3.8 billion.
By 2012, EBITDA had turned negative and Lampert was beginning to basically liquidate Sears' assets, essentially selling the valuable commodities of a public company to private and public firms where ESL had ownership interests. As one hedge fund manager described it, "Eddie has orchestrated for himself, and for the benefit of shareholders, the most protracted liquidation in history". The Land's End brand was sold in 2015. Last year, the company's most valuable brand, Craftsman tools, was sold off to Stanley Black & Decker.
But by far Lampert's biggest grab of Sears' assets was what he did with the real estate the company owned. Lampert sold those real estate assets off to Seritage Growth Properties, who then agreed to lease those stores back to Sears. The sale raised $2.7 billion for Sears which was largely used to pay off Sear's debt, some of which was owed to Lampert's ESL fund. Lampert is Seritage's chairman and the firm is 40% owned by ESL. This move so outraged other investors that they filed a class action suit against Lampert's self dealing which ended up with Sears, not Lampert, paying out a $40 million settlement.
Sears will now enter bankruptcy where Lampert will still remain in nominal control of the company and benefit yet again from the distribution of the remains of the company he destroyed. He managed to take a company with a net worth of $12.7 billion in 2006 and turn it into a firm with a net worth of $-3.8 billion, a loss of $16.5 billion of net worth in a decade. He was able to do this because the company's board were Lampert cronies, including his college roommate and great friend Steve Mnuchin, who only had the interests of themselves and the shareholders, not the company as a whole, at heart.
America is not Sears and we will not be going bankrupt anytime soon, primarily because we have the ability to print dollars. But vulture capitalism was largely made possible by Republican tax and economic policies, so we should not be surprised to see those policies mimic vulture capitalism at the federal and state level.
Like Lampert's refusal to invest in the upkeep of Sears's stores, state and federal governments have underinvested in our nation's infrastructure for decades. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the US infrastructure a D+ rating in 2017 and estimates we will have to spend $4.5 trillion within the next decade on necessary repairs and upgrades. This underinvestment extends beyond infrastructure into education where things had so deteriorated that teachers in multiple red states went on strike for higher wages and more resources earlier this year.
When Sears was actually generating lots of cash, Lampert would use that money to engage in stock buybacks, increasing the share price and putting money in his own pockets and those of his shareholders. When the cash flow shrank, Lampert would try to "cut his way to success", laying off more employees and closing more stores. When even that became unsustainable, Lampert then sold off the firm's assets, again enriching himself and his shareholders.
Republicans have taken a similar path. When times are good, they will cut taxes for their wealthy benefactors. Bush did this in 2001 and Trump and the GOP just pulled off a double earlier this year, literally putting money in the pockets of their benefactors and the shareholder class by cutting corporate tax rates. The money that companies saved from the lower tax rates almost overwhelmingly went in to the share repurchase plans that Lampert loved.
When the debt or deficit rises, largely as a result of prior GOP policies, then Republicans declare that it's time to cut costs, meaning slashing Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security if they can get away with it. Just today, McConnell blamed the rising deficits on federal spending programs, citing those three programs as "driver of the debt by any objective standard." The fact that corporate tax receipts have fallen by one-third thanks to the tax cuts went unmentioned. And Republicans are always interested in selling off public lands and assets to private interests.
Eddie Lampert spent a decade pillaging Sears until there was nothing left. Republicans have spent nearly the last 40 years doing the same to America.
Monday, October 15, 2018
Climate Change May Have Just Destroyed 10% Of Our F-22 Fighters
The F-22 and the F-35 are the backbone of America's fighter aircraft capabilities. Imagine if the United States was attacked by an external force and nearly 10% of our total number of F-22 fighter planes were destroyed by that enemy. That would be a story.
In fact, it actually happened just last week when Hurricane Michael devastated Tyndall Air Force base near Panama City, Florida. Reports indicate that 17 F22-Raptors were damaged or destroyed by the hurricane. These are probably all training aircraft or could not be moved because of maintenance or safety problems. Any combat-ready F-22s were presumably moved off-base before the storm hit. But, even so, those 17 planes represent about 10% of the entire US F-22 fleet. Each plane costs at least $140 million.
Under President Obama, climate change rose to be considered one of the primary dangers facing the US in the coming years. Trump has reversed that stance, dropping climate change from the National Security Strategy. But the destruction of these F-22s shows that climate change is real. The military agrees. The scientists agree and believe we have just over a decade to forestall its most catastrophic effects. But the Republican party, beholden to the money provided by the fossil fuel industry, will ignore the generals and the scientists, while Donald Trump declares "Something's changing and it will change back again". Not even the destruction of 10% of our F-22 force will change their views.
In fact, it actually happened just last week when Hurricane Michael devastated Tyndall Air Force base near Panama City, Florida. Reports indicate that 17 F22-Raptors were damaged or destroyed by the hurricane. These are probably all training aircraft or could not be moved because of maintenance or safety problems. Any combat-ready F-22s were presumably moved off-base before the storm hit. But, even so, those 17 planes represent about 10% of the entire US F-22 fleet. Each plane costs at least $140 million.
Under President Obama, climate change rose to be considered one of the primary dangers facing the US in the coming years. Trump has reversed that stance, dropping climate change from the National Security Strategy. But the destruction of these F-22s shows that climate change is real. The military agrees. The scientists agree and believe we have just over a decade to forestall its most catastrophic effects. But the Republican party, beholden to the money provided by the fossil fuel industry, will ignore the generals and the scientists, while Donald Trump declares "Something's changing and it will change back again". Not even the destruction of 10% of our F-22 force will change their views.
